Reproducing innovation in sports journalism
Some super-nerdy thoughts on the industry based in organizational sociology
Programming note: We’re early this week and next week for the holidays.
A warning from the jump: This one’s getting real nerdy real fast.
I’ve been revisiting a bunch of my organizational sociology readings from grad school recently. It’s something I hope to do more of in 2025, going back to these concepts and theories to help understand what’s happened to sports journalism in the digital and social media age and paths forward for the profession.
I was re-reading parts of “Organizations and Organizing” by W. Richard Scott and Grant Davis and this quote, from Howard Aldrich’s work, jumped out at me:
Reproducer organizations are defined as those organizations started in an established population whose routines and competencies vary only minimally, if at all, from those of existing organizations. They bring little or no incremental knowledge to the populations they enter, organizing the same activities in the same ways as their predecessors. Innovative organizations, by contrast, are those organizations started by entrepreneurs whose routines and competencies vary significantly from those of existing organizations.
As always, I process ideas like this through the lens of sports journalism and sports media. And it got me thinking about whether or not there have been any truly innovative organizations in sports journalism in the past 20 years.
And at first glance, I don’t think there are. Not in the way that Aldrich defines innovative. There has not been a paradigm shift in how sports journalism in a way that the routines and competencies are very different than those that came before it. There have been changes, of course. But one thing that I’ve consistently found in my research and reading is that through all the technological innovations, the job of sports journalism has remained basically the same for 100 years. There was a game last night. Who won and why?
That paragraph from Aldrich is very similar to the idea of competence destroying and competence enhancing technologies, another concept from organizational sociology, this one from Philip Anderson and Michael Tushman.
I told you we were getting super nerdy this week.
Anyway, a competence-enhancing change is an incremental improvement in the way things are done. It enhances the current business structure and the companies that are the leaders in this industry. HDTV would be an example—it’s an order-of-magnitude improvement, but it is not something completely new. A competence-destroying technology is something that is completely new. It’s not just a new product or an improvement, it’s one that completely destroys the old way of doing business. It’s a complete paradigm shift. It changes everything.
A true competence-destroying technology is rare. There are usually a handful in the life of an industry. When a competence-destroying technology comes about, it leads to a time of great upheaval in an industry, and organizations regroup and change and try to adapt to this new technology. After that time of upheaval, things steady out.
Again, it’s easy to say that the internet is an example of this.
For a technology to be truly competence-destroying, it must make the old way of doing business obsolete. In one of their examples, the skills needed to work on a diesel locomotive are completely different than the skills needed for a steam locomotive.
Again, I think about this through the lens of sports journalism. It’s easy to say that the internet has been a competence-destroying technology. It disrupted the world, right? But if the skills needed to be a print news reporter are not that much different than the skills needed to be a digital news reporter, has this really been an example of a competence-destroying technology?
If anything, I think the invention of HTML and the graphical web is a competence-destroying technology. You could make an argument that the iPhone was as much a competence-destroying technology than anything .
But I think this all matters, because understanding how technology has really changed our industry can help us find a better path forward.